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“I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS HAUNTING EXPLORATION OF LOVE, GUILT, AND REDEMPTION. THROUGH TWO BROTHERS, THE FIREFLIES TRACES THE HIDDEN COST OF FAMILY SECRETS. TO OUR JOY, WE FIND THAT WHAT WE FEAR MOST CAN FREE US."
— DAVID L. MARCUS, CO-WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND AUTHOR OF ACCEPTANCE
Richard is driving south on the New Jersey Turnpike. Suddenly, a commercial airplane explodes above him and his world changes forever. From small town New Jersey to Key West, Florida, to the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, The Fireflies explores the human condition through the eyes of a man longing to find his truth. Read Excerpt →
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In this searing memoir, a father confronts the complex issues of love and hate as he struggles to deal with his emotionally troubled and often violent son. Desperate Love examines the lengths that parents go to preserve their families and rescue children from themselves. Often gritty and occasionally funny, this extraordinary memoir follows one father’s quest for love, faith, redemption and understanding in a life beleaguered with infertility, adoption and adolescent aggression.
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"Finally—a book that offers parents uncompromising insights into a family’s struggles when a child goes awry. Desperate Love is a gritty yet elegantly told account of a son’s spiral downward from suburban comfort to the Never Never Land of adolescents who fall by the wayside. And yet, incredibly, Richard Reiss also has given us an unforgettable memoir of a father who is a relentless optimist."
—David L. Marcus, Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of What It Takes to Pull Me Through and Acceptance.
"Richard Reiss is a brave writer who lays bare one father’s struggle to love his troubled son. This groundbreaking memoir is both beautiful and brutal."
—Jana Wolff, author of Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother
Richard Reiss’s Desperate Love:A Father’s Memoir begins as a sweet dream of parental hope and rapidly descends into nightmare—the nightmare that is the very worst one a father fears—a nightmare in which his son is fighting demons, and is losing. The father tries his best to fight the demons with the boy, and he is losing, too. The worst thing about this worst nightmare any father can have is that each morning when you wake there is no relief of recognition that the nightmare was just a dream—it was real! It is real! Heartbreaking, terrifying, beautifully written, fearlessly honest, yet tempered by the constant love and hope that holds a family together, Richard Reiss’s Desperate Love is a book you will not be able to put down and one that you will never forget. The book concludes with a note of hope—hope born of love—of desperate love.”
—Thomas E. Kennedy, author of In the Company of Angels and Falling Sideways